micro

Louis liked the name: Prospect Cemetery. As if its prescient eighteenth-century builders had known that one day college boys would come there to look for one-night boyfriends. Louis himself found no prospects in Prospect Cemetery. He tried but they didn’t find him...

No time left in Jackie’s thumbs. They died before the rest of her, dangled precious on jagged hipbones, in and out of false pockets. Useless. Amputation was out of the question. Her son moved in to lift cartons of milk, boxes of cereal, orthopedic pillows. Take out...

Children play on street corners until the lights grow dim and the stars are visible like pinpricks on a bulletin board. Dinner is an any-hour activity of bologna sandwiches and watered-down Kool-Aid. There’s no urgency for the children in getting home at a particular...

Once a week a truck driver drove down our street. Stuck to the sides of the semi were two television screens. Massive plasma bastards. The screens always promoted something new: shoes, video games, the dentist running for president, carrying wisdom teeth in a bag. The...

Womb Cat wants to paint her house fluorescent orange. Call it Crisis. Call it citrus combating scurvy. Cat doesn’t go outside much anymore. She orders in her groceries. She doesn’t answer the doorbell, and whenever the mailman walks onto her porch with another...

But here I am anyway, in the CVS on Perkins and Sixteenth, allowing her to turn me criminal. Like this. Don’t be, like, obvious. See? When she slides a lipstick into her palm, it’s so delicate, you’d think she was lifting a bird. At the counter, three Maybelline...

You’re standing with toes far back from the edge, not prepared for a swim that night in Otsego when he sneaks up behind and throws you in from the dock, not out, but off to the side where it’s too shallow. You slice both heels on the zebra mussels, squat-swim to the...

We were always driving and once in the night in the dark after hours and hours, days even of only night driving, you said to me. We’ve gone a thousand miles. We could have gone to New York by now. We could have gone anywhere. You said it in the dark. It was Cedar...